Marcel Janco recalled,

" As he recalled, these works were not well received in the post-war Zionist community, because they evoked painful memories in a general mood of optimism ; as a result, Janco decided to change his palette and tackle subjects which related exclusively to his new country.

Around that year, Janco took commissions as an art teacher at his studio in Bucharest — in the words of his pupil, the future painter-photographer Hedda Sterne, these were unimpressive: " We were given easels, etc.

Marinetti was again praised by the Contimporanul group ( Vinea, Janco, Petraşcu, Costin ) in February 1934, in an open letter stating: " We are soldiers of the same army.

In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber, and Hans Richter, along with others, discussed art and put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it.

In the years prior to World War I similar art had already risen in Bucharest and other Eastern European cities ; it is likely that DADA's catalyst was the arrival in Zurich of artists like Tzara and Janco.

Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, founders of the Dadaist movement, were also of Romanian origin.

Other founding members were Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp.

Unlike Tzara, who refused to look back on Simbolul with anything but embarrassment, Janco was proud of this moment in life, depicting it as his first participation in artistic revolution.

It is possible that, during those years, Tzara and Janco first came to hear and be influenced by the absurdist prose of Urmuz, the lonesome civil clerk and amateur writer who would later become the hero of Romanian modernism.

In this context, Janco is cited as a source for the story according to which the invention of the term " Dada " belonged exclusively to Tzara.

Exhibited at the Dada group shows, Janco also illustrated the Dada advertisements, including an April 1917 program which features his sketches of Ball, Tzara and Ball's actress wife Emmy Hennings.

Janco made his final contribution to the Dada adventure in April 1919, when he designed the masks for a major Dada event organized by Tzara at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, and which degenerated into an infamous mass brawl.

It is not unlikely that Janco followed with curiosity the activities of Dada's Parisian cell, which were overseen by Tzara and his pupil André Breton, and he is known to have impressed Breton with his own architectural projects.

A non-author performance of L ' amiral cherche une maison a louer, the simultaneous Dada poem written by Huelsenbeck with Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, can be heard on the audio CD Futurism and Dada Reviewed

The two brothers were soon joined by younger Georges Janco, but all three were left without any financial support when the war began hampering Europe's trade routes ; until October 1917, both Jules and Marcel ( who found it impossible to sell his various paintings ) earned a living as cabaret performers.

" Art historian Nissim Gal also concludes: " the pastoral vision of Janco not include any trace of the inhabitants of the former Arab village ".

Janco was even affiliated with Artistes Radicaux, a more politically inclined section of Das Neue Leben, where his colleagues included other former Dadas: Arp, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling.

Around 1913, Janco was in more direct contact with the French sources of Iser's Postimpressionism, having by then discovered on his own the work of André Derain.

At the end of the Dada episode, Janco also took his growing interest in primitivism to the level of academia: in his 1918 speech at the Zurich Institute, he declared that African, Etruscan, Byzantine and Romanesque arts were more genuine and " spiritual " than the Renaissance and its derivatives, while also issuing special praise for the modern spirituality of Derain, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse ; his lecture rated all Cubists above all Impressionists.

Marcel Janco was born on May 24, 1895 in Bucharest to an upper middle class Jewish family.

In a letter to Janco, Vinea spoke about having personally presented one of Janco's posters to modernist poet and art critic Tudor Arghezi: " said, critically, that you cannot say whether a person is talented or not on the basis of only one drawing.

However, having decided to focus on his other projects, Janco nearly abandoned his studies, and failed his final exam.

Marcel Janco also took charge of Contimporanuls business side, designing its offices on Imprimerie Street and overseeing the publication of postcards.

Janco was also largely responsible for the Contimporanul issue on Surrealism, which included his interviews with writers such as Joseph Delteil, and his inquiry about the publisher Simon Krà.

This had little effect on the Birous output: before 1937, Janco and his brother designed some 40 permanent or temporary structures in Bucharest, all of them located in the northern and central areas ( the " Yellow " and " Black " sectors, as they were known at the time ).

In 1931, Janco built himself a new family home, the blockhouse known as " Clara Iancu Building ", on Caimatei.

Janco and some other regulars of Contimporanul also reached out to the Surrealist faction at unu review — Janco is notably mentioned as a " contributor " on the cover of unu, Summer 1930 issue, where all 8 containing pages were purposefully left blank.

Probably commissioned by Mircea Eliade, Janco also began work on the " Alexandrescu Building ", a tenement for Eliade's sister and her family.

Together with Margareta Sterian, who became his disciple, Janco was working on artistic projects involving ceramics and fresco.

Throughout the period, Janco was still on demand as a draftsman: in 1934, his depiction of poet Constantin Nissipeanu opened the first print of Nisspeanu's Metamorfoze ; in 1936, he published a posthumous portrait of writer Mateiu Caragiale, to illustrate the Perpessicius edition of Caragiale's poems.

In particular, Janco was an early influence on three Zionist artists who had arrived to Palestine from other regions: Avigdor Stematsky, Yehezkel Streichman and Joseph Zaritsky.

Janco felt that the place should not be demolished, obtaining a lease on it from the authorities, and rebuilt the place with other Israeli artists who worked there on weekends ; Janco's main residence continued to be in the neighborhood of Ramat Aviv.

After 1930, when Constructivism lost its position of leadership on Romania's artistic scene, Janco made a return to " analytic " Cubism, echoing the early work of Picasso in his painting Peasant Woman and Eggs.

Also then, Janco worked on seascape and still life canvasses, in brown tones and Cubist arrangements.

Admired by his contemporaries on the avant-garde scene, Marcel Janco is mentioned or portrayed in several works by Romanian authors.

In the 1910s, Vinea dedicated him the poem " Tuzla ", which is one of his first contributions to modernist literature ; a decade later, one of the Janco exhibits inspired him to write the prose poem Danţul pe frânghie (" Dancing on a Wire ").

The Janco Dada Museum, named after Marcel Janco, in Ein Hod, Israel

About Richter's woodcuts and drawings Michel Seuphor wrote: " Richter's black-and-whites together with those of Arp and Janco, are the most typical works of the Zürich period of Dada.

Marcel Janco was the brother Georges and Jules Janco, who were his artistic partners during and after the Dada episode.

Janco was the director and mask designer for the Dada production for another one of Kokoschka's plays, Job.

His assimilation of Expressionism has led scholar John Willett to discuss Dadaism as visually an Expressionist sub-current, and, in retrospect, Janco himself claimed that Dada was not as much a fully-fledged new artistic style as " a force coming from the physical instincts ", directed against " everything cheap ".

As a Dada, Janco was interested in the raw and primitive art, generated by " the instinctive power of creation ", and he credited Paul Klee with having helped him " interpret the soul of primitive man ".

Around 1919, Janco had come to describe Constructivism as a needed transition from " negative " Dada, an idea also pioneered by his colleagues Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg, and finding an early expression in Janco's plaster relief Soleil jardin clair ( 1918 ).

Instead, Janco was publicizing the idea that Dada and various other strands of modernism were the actual tradition, for being indirectly indebted to the absurdist nature of Romanian folklore.

According to Sandqvist, there are three competing aspects in Janco's legacy, which relate to the complexity of his profile: " In Western cultural history Marcel Janco is best known as one of the founding members of Dada in Zurich in 1916.

* Works by Marcel Janco, University of Iowa International Dada Archive

In Zurich in 1918, he re-connected with Hans Arp and took part in several Dada activities, befriending Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Taeuber, and the other dadaists connected to the Cabaret Voltaire.